I am getting very confused between 準 & 准. They are both pronounced the same, both mean basically the same thing semi-, associate, junior.

When to use which one?

Personally, I've never seen 准 and i've read 50+ books in japanese, read a lot of japaenses internet, watched lots of japanese tv (dramas and talk/variety shows) and I just looked it up on jisho and reaffirmed that i've never seen those words with that kanji before before...

準 is used ie kijun, suijun, junjiru

I have seen 准 used mostly in names of offices or ranks like 准尉, but it seems to be interchangeable with 準.

I would just like to point out that in Chinese, 准 is the simplified version of 準 so I treat them as the same character. I've also never seen 准 used before, which makes sense since Japanese primarily uses the traditional form.

But both of them are in joyo kanji list.

Yeah 准 seems to have been one they added in the recent expansion; I wonder why. The examples the official list gives are 准将 and 批准; I guess 批准 is used a lot in government so they wanted that in there (Koujien does not give 準 as a possibility for that word).

yudantaiteki Wrote:Yeah 准 seems to have been one they added in the recent expansion; I wonder why. The examples the official list gives are 准将 and 批准; I guess 批准 is used a lot in government so they wanted that in there (Koujien does not give 準 as a possibility for that word).

actually, 准 has been in the Joyo list since the very beginning.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji

It's certainly not a common kanji, I only remember seeing it for 准教授 and some military ranks like 准尉, as yudantaiteki said.

First thing that came to mind was 批准. 准教授 is also a common word, as mentioned. I wouldn't really call it a rare character.

I've never seen anything to suggest that they're interchangeable in Japanese. In my experience, 准 seems to be quite uncommon and its use seems to be almost entirely limited to hierarchical job positions and the word 批准.

Yeah I don't think they are either. Wiki has this paragraph on that I do not really feel like comprehending. As for the original question people listed the two instances you'll see the rarer "jun" so problem is solved right?

日本で助教を指して使われる「Assistant Professor」は、直訳が「助教授」となる。また、北米における「Assistant Professor」の職務や待遇は、日本で言う「准教授」に相当することもあり、矛盾がおきる場合もある。

こういった意味では「教授」と「助教授」の間に「准教授」ではなく準教授という職階を置いていた国際基督教大学の制度が北米の教員職階システムに最も忠実なものであったと言われることがある。しかし、その国際基督教大学においても、法改正後は学校教育法改正に伴い「助教授」を「准教授」に、「準教授」を「上級准教授」にそれぞれ名を改めている。

順天堂大学では、「准教授」を「先任准教授」に、「講師」を「准教授」にそれぞれ名を改めている。

Yeah, good luck making sense of that excerpt.

That quotation does raise an interesting, and completely unrelated point - Japan seems to use the term "Assistant [profession]" when they really mean "[profession]'s Assistant."

A common one in showbiz is Assistant Director (AD), which is actually nothing more than a production assistant - not a director at all.

MindTrick Wrote:I would just like to point out that in Chinese, 准 is the simplified version of 準 so I treat them as the same character. I've also never seen 准 used before, which makes sense since Japanese primarily uses the traditional form.

I pointed out above that these are not interchangeable in Japanese, but in Chinese as well, 准 is not just a simplified version of 準. Traditional Chinese uses both distinctly, and this is one of many cases where one character was subsumed into another character in Simplified Chinese.